BOOK REVIEW.

X-rated Effort Bares Tortured Soul

May 02, 1996|By Mike Kiley, Tribune Staff Writer.

Dennis Rodman has become a librarian's worst nightmare.

There will be all kinds of authority figures who will spew eternal hellfire and damnation down on his obscenity-laced and sexually provocative autobiography, particularly parents of young children who are already enamored of a rebel happy to give them the shirt off his back.

"Bad As I Wanna Be," available this week in Chicago bookstores, is a title as two-sided and bedeviled as the irreverent Bulls player claims to be. It's a boast and a heartfelt cry for help. Rodman will be the last to acknowledge it, but anybody so shadowed and cobwebbed by thoughts of suicide could use some professional counseling.

His dark forays into a fixation with death, and a warning from Rodman that his life will end with a gunshot to the head if he lives long enough to see his goals and dreams evaporate in old age, will be lost and trampled beneath the glitz. For instance, his affection for wearing sequined halter tops, his fantasies of having a homosexual relationship and his racist assertions that black players can dominate white players whenever they choose.

But if there is a thread that runs through these patchwork musings, this e.e. cummings stream of consciousness, it is Rodman's death. Ponderings on his demise open and close an otherwise farcical odyssey, replete with hugs for Madonna and Michael and slugs for David Robinson, Chuck Person and the NBA image-makers.

The book will delight Chicagoans who consider Rodman a folk hero and disgust those who view him as a self-centered, dirty-mouthed egoist.

The truth, as Rodman sees it, is always naked. So you can easily tell this book by its cover. Clothes don't make this man, not when you have red hair dye and his favorite pink nail polish available. He sits naked on his Harley like Howard Stern.

"The NBA is afraid of me," he writes. "The people at the top of the league think they need to rein me in so I don't become another Michael Jordan, somebody they aren't able to mold and shape and make their puppet."

The typeface of the book was a daring gamble by Delacourt Press. While at first it seems to trivialize the book's content, making it suitable for morons, the use of boldfaced capital letters at selected parts of the book ultimately serves to re-emphasize the maverick nature that Rodman is trying to justify and glorify.

A large part of Rodman's audience is kids, those lucky enough to wait as he leaves the floor to find if he will shower them with the gift of his jersey, and those who identify from afar with his indifference toward authority and rules. Should they read this X-rated book?

"I thought when I was growing up I was going to be gay," Rodman blurts out. "If I want to wear a dress, I'll wear a dress. I fantasize about being with another man."

When he isn't trying to shock you with his forthright views, he tries to secure his own place in the history of the league. Like many autobiographers before him, he fears that left in other hands that place will be too murky for his liking.

"In the history of the NBA, you may never see anybody play with the kind of emotion I bring to the floor. You may never see anyone else who is willing to go out there and show all sides of himself, just be an open book in front of the whole world."